The life, death and resurrection of Jesus is a scream from the foundations of the world - the full-throated victory cry of the eternal Word vanquishing the foes of nothingness and death forever. Lent is a liturgical forgetting and rediscovering of this victory. The drama of the cosmos helps remind us in Lenten fashion that there is no depth to which we can descend where the promise of God does not echo.
Out of nothing was born the dead creation of space and time. The elemental drops of our cosmos raced away from the beginning leaving a wake of stardust and cold empty space. For billions and billions of years, the dead-from-nothing settled and calmed according to its nature. For unfathomable eons more, the dead-from-nothing waited in unconscious gestation for the birth of its child, life-from-death. And yet we find ourselves in disharmony with the cosmos.
We experience ourselves not as life-from-death people, but death-from-life people. We are the undead vampires of our nightmares, surviving not by taking what is dead and making it alive, but by taking what is alive and making it dead. Our consciences sense this disharmony. Formed out of nothing, born of death, and sprung forth from life, our conscience knows something it will not let us forget. We are not now who we are called to be.
Lent calls us to dwell in this uncomfortable space, to listen without resolution to the dissonance of our song. We now fast, give and pray as those who might be life-from-death people, fully and freely giving of ourselves completely. We will fail this Lent to become what we are called to be. But fear not. The scream of the eternal Word brings our discordant lives into harmony with the victory song over nothingness and death. We don’t discover any hidden treasures during Lent. We simply forget and search long enough that Easter arrives, victorious.
